CHCS - Perspectives Summer/Fall 2017

College of Health Care Sciences 37 First Steps in Team Building: An Interprofessional Experience By Joann E. Gallichio, D.Sc. , PT, NCS, Assistant Professor PROVIDING OPTIMAL HEALTH CARE for patients requires collaboration between multiple disciplines. The collaboration between different health care professionals working together to meet the patient’s needs and optimize patient outcomes is referred to as interprofessional health care. Interprofessional teamwork may increase patient satisfaction and decrease the incidence of medical errors. Interprofessional care is distinct from multidisciplinary care, which describes multiple disciplines separately working with the same patient. To facilitate interprofessional practice, orga- nizations such as the Interprofessional Education Collaborative (IPEC) were created. They encourage health care educational programs to prepare future practitioners to embody a team- based approach to health care to improve patient outcomes. The Doctor of Physical Therapy (D.P.T.) Program in Tampa recently implemented an interprofessional education (IPE) experience combining fourth-year D.P.T. students with speech-language pathology (SLP) students and faculty members and occupational therapy faculty members during a patient experience called Neuro Boot Camp. The experience provides real patients with chronic neurologic conditions, such as stroke and multiple sclerosis, with five intensive days of physical therapy. The term boot camp is used because it is an intensive session of 2.5 to 5 hours of daily therapy. Incorporating other rehabilitation professionals into the boot camp allowed students to learn about the roles and responsibilities of different disciplines, as well as practice their communication skills with various students and practi- tioners. Physical therapy (PT) students provided a synopsis of the patient’s history, functional limitations, and physical therapy plan of care to the other disciplines. Throughout the session, they were assessed by student speech therapists and a licensed occupational therapist. When appropriate, the other practitioners and students could conduct tests and educate the physical therapy students and patient volunteers on their findings. This IPE experience pro- vided an excellent forum for all participants to learn from one another and to see the patient volunteers through a new lens. Following the IPE experience, the physical therapy students met with Lynda Ross, D.P.T., D.H.S., PT, faculty member and member of the CHCS Best Practices Interprofessional Educa- tion Subcommittee, for a debriefing. The debriefing’s purpose was to discover what students previously thought about the different professions, explore what they learned, and find out how their learning would influence future clinical practice. “The students recognized the importance of collaborating with other health care providers to improve quality of care, and they gained a greater understanding of the roles of both occupational therapy and speech-language pathology in patient care,” said Ross, following the debriefings. Overall, the experience was successful, and the students from both other disciplines say that they look forward to working with their physical therapy colleagues in the future. ●